Graham Nelson Quotes

I'm frustrated when I see movies in which I feel like the plot is being told to me instead of shown to me.

The flashbacks are a great way to give answers to the story.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.'

Use plot to buttress a story.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.

I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'

I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre.

The structural notions to me always have to be worked out very carefully in the script stage. Whatever a particular structure is. Whether it's chronological or non-chronological. To me that's always about what point of view are we trying to address in the film?

Stories work, if they have a beginning, middle and end.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

Because I come from the theater, I use the images of the theater and of movies a great deal when I write. I see the story in my head. I have to break down the outline of a story first. I have to know where I'm going. Usually I have a good beginning and a good ending, and then I think, "Now I have to find my way through it."

You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.

Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.

I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.